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"Last month, senior Bihar BJP leader Sushil Modi declared that if Yogi Adityanath, BJP MP from Gorakhpur, had spoken of “love jihad” in Bihar the way he did in Uttar Pradesh, he “would have contradicted him”. It was a strong statement coming from an RSS-trained politician, which suggests that the BJP’s rising star in UP belongs to a different school of thought. Adityanath embodies a specific tradition that can be traced back to Digvijay Nath, a major figure in the line of mahants of the Gorakhnath temple of Gorakhpur. For more than half a century, the mahants have played a role in politics. An orphan from Udaipur — and a Rajput, as the mahant of the Gorakhnath temple has always been — Digvijay Nath, who was born in 1894, was brought up in the math. He joined the Congress in 1921 and was arrested for taking “active part” in the Chauri Chaura incident (Lok Sabha Who’s Who, 1967). He joined the Hindu Mahasabha in 1937 — when Savarkar took over — three years after being appointed mahant, and soon became head of the party’s unit in the United Provinces. Like many members of the Mahasabha, he strongly opposed Gandhi. Just three days before Gandhi’s murder, he “exhorted Hindu militants to kill the Mahatma”, according to Krishna and Dhirendra K. Jha (Ayodhya: The Dark Night, page 28). This landed him in jail, but for nine months only. ..

Within his fiefdom, Adityanath has established a certain hegemony. He fielded his own candidates, such as Radhamohan Das Agarwal, who contested state elections as a Hindu Mahasabha candidate in 2002 and 2007, against official BJP candidates. After his first electoral win in 1998, Adityanath created his own youth wing, the Hindu Yuva Vahini, distinct from the RSS and the Bajrang Dal. This group was implicated in a communal riot in 2007, which resulted in the death of two people in Gorakhpur. Curfew was imposed for several days. Adityanath was arrested but soon released...

During the by-election campaign, Adityanath exhorted Hindus to convert 100 Muslim women for every Hindu converted by Muslims. The Election Commission reprimanded him for speech that was “provoking feelings of enmity”. But this is probably what the polarisation strategy is about. It contributed to the BJP’s success in western UP in the Lok Sabha elections, which happened in the wake of the Muzaffarnagar riots. In the by-elections, though, this technique did not yield dividends for the BJP. But will the party consider that this failure stemmed from highlighting the wrong themes at a time people are more interested in development than in anything else? Or will it continue in the same vein? If it does, Adityanath may assert himself even more. And in that case, the Ayodhya issue will probably stage a comeback on the BJP agenda in UP, since Adityanath’s personal beliefs will also be freighted with the legacy of Digvijay Nath and Avaidyanath."